In a world so obsessed by security, it may be no surprise that this World Cup has been dominated, in tactical terms, by players employed to provide the equivalent of razor wire, CCTV cameras and dog patrols. If there is a single answer to the question "Why did England lose (and why are Spain and Holland in the final)?" it lies not in the quality of the respective teams' attacking play, whether that be Wayne Rooney's ineptitude or the lethal finishing of David Villa, but in the area occupied by those highly disciplined individuals known to modern football as holding midfield players. And nowadays, at the highest level, one is not enough.

This week's semi-finals were contested by four teams built around the double pivot: Mark van Bommel and Demy de Zeeuw (deputising for the suspended Nigel de Jong) for Holland, Xabi Alonso and Sergio Busquets for Spain, Bastian Schweinsteiger and Sami Khedira for Germany, and Walter Gargano and Egidio Arévalo for Uruguay. No team lacking two such players, or incapable of making the mechanism work properly, got beyond the last eight.

But, as Sunday's final will demonstrate, there is more than one way to operate this system than to try to get two men to play like Claude Makelele. The contest at Soccer City is likely to be decided by which of these two pairs has the right combination of qualities and functions more effectively on the night: the tough, ruthless, uncompromising Van Bommel and De Jong, who are frequently to be found involved in untidy tussles for possession, or the more refined Alonso and Busquets, whose instincts are to screen their defence and win the ball first by clever positioning and then by waiting for an opponent's moment of error or imprecision.

The direct contrast between Van Bommel and Alonso illustrates the breadth of the role's definition. At the start of Tuesday's semi-final against Uruguay the Dutch player could hardly stop giving the ball away, but his willingness to scuffle gradually earned him the right to influence the course of the match. The Spaniard, on the other hand, is prized for the accuracy of his passing and shooting, particularly over long distances, and against Germany on Sunday he could sometimes be found moving upfield and switching roles with Xavi, who dropped back alongside Busquets while Alonso was trying to get the goal in his sights.

De Jong and Busquets prove a different point, which is that you do not need to be a player of obviously resplendent gifts to do this job. What you need, as well as good technique, is a highly developed sense of the game's geometry and a keen nose for danger. Both these players share a measure of the quality for which Makelele was noted, at least by those who watched him closely: an ability, having won the ball, to use it quickly and shrewdly, using the tempo and angle of short passes to set attacks in motion.

They differ, however, in one significant respect. De Jong's physical power gives him a fairly obvious presence on the pitch, whereas Busquets goes about his business virtually incognito. In fact you could say that the more invisible he is, the more efficiently he is doing his job.

Carlos Alberto Parreira started the fashion for picking a pair of screening midfielders at USA '94, deploying Dunga and Mauro Silva to positions in front of Brazil's back four. In Japan and South Korea eight years later Luiz Felipe Scolari modified the defensive alignment – using three centre-backs and two wing-backs – but kept the double lock just ahead of them from the quarter-finals onward, in the form of Gilberto Silva and Kléberson.

In this year's Champions League, José Mourinho employed Internazionale's Esteban Cambiasso and Thiago Motta to asphyxiate Barcelona's creative players in the semi-final, replacing the suspended Motta with Javier Zanetti for the final against Bayern Munich, in which they comfortably outperformed the German club's equivalent pairing of Van Bommel and Schweinsteiger.

Nothing proves the importance of the formula more clearly than the experience of the nations – France, Italy, England – guilty of the worst failures at this World Cup. France lost Lassana Diarra on the eve of the tournament and tried unsuccessfully to improvise with ineffective combinations of Jérémy Toulalan, Abou Diaby and Alou Diarra in their three matches. Italy, unable to call on Andrea Pirlo – their Xabi Alonso – until the last half-hour of their final match, struggled in vain to find a viable alternative and, like France, their fellow finalists in 2006, not only failed to progress to the last 16 but finished bottom of their group.

England, of course, have never bothered to develop a specialist in the position, preferring to assume that players with other gifts can somehow get to grips with it. Owen Hargreaves, born in Canada and raised as a footballer in Germany, came as a gift that it took Sven-Goran Eriksson several years fully to appreciate, and when the player started to experience long-term knee problems after the 2006 World Cup nobody thought it was worth trying to find or develop a proper replacement.

Fabio Capello hung on to the hope of taking Hargreaves to South Africa until the last minute, but when Sir Alex Ferguson told him that the player had not reached the required state of recovery, he declined the chance to take the nearest thing to a like-for-like replacement – Scott Parker – and fell back on the old formula of Gareth Barry plus Frank Lampard. It had been good enough in the qualifying tournament but was found badly wanting when the big questions were being asked.

The lesson is obvious. But as the hurry and scurry of the Premier League resumes next month, it is likely to go unheard once again.